From the course: Designing a Book Cover

Using Live Paint to color type

From the course: Designing a Book Cover

Using Live Paint to color type

What I want to next is I want to fill in the interior shapes of the letters with bright colors: red, yellow and blue. Firstly, it's going to be helpful if I make myself a color group of those three colors. So, I am going to come over to my Swatches panel, and my panels, because of the monitor resolution that I am having to use here for recording, they are a little bit cramped. I am going to pull off my Swatches panel and just extend that a bit. Now, I am going to choose my red, hold down my Command or my Ctrl key, my yellow and my blue and then come and click on this one here, New Color Group. We can give that a name. We'll call the Miro. Now, I am going to select all of my letters and then come and find my Live Paint tool, which in Illustrator CS5 has been hidden a bit. It's now under this tool space, the Shape Builder tool. It now lives under here. So, if you can't find it, that's where it is, Live Paint Bucket. Then I just come and click on my selected items. I should see this message, Click to make Live Paint group. When I do so, I'll then want to come and select this color group, because I can now, as you can see when I-- I'm just going to zoom in Command+Spacebar, click-and-drag. When I mouse over these interior shapes, I get the option of filling them with a color. The red highlight indicates what shape you are about to affect. So, I am going to put my cursor right there and you'll see I have three color swatches, they are color swatches of my color group and I can move through those by pressing my left arrow, right arrow. So, it's really simple. We just mouse over these and apply whichever color we want, and there is our result. Now, we need to save this and then we need to incorporate it into the design in InDesign. So, I am going to save this. I am not going to overwrite this one because then you wouldn't have the starting step, but I have one already prepared that is exactly the same as this. In the InDesign layout is the finished version, handdrawn type, but we can start with this one, handdrawn type_begin. Let me just explain the other elements that we have here. Using the grid I've made these solid fields of a not quiet 100% yellow at the top and at the bottom, and then over the top of that we have the author name really big. We are doing the Big Book Look, so we want the author name really big. Then continuing through with this color palette of red, yellow and blue. So, all I am going to do now is come to File and Place, Exercise Files folder, and in the Link folder, the Links folder is where all the graphic assets are. There is this Illustrator file, homage to catalonia miro type. I am going to open that and then I am just going to click and drag to place that and then position it over this field of the reduced tint yellow. There we have our first book cover concept.

Contents